Katie Stallard

Moscow Correspondent

"A free press," Winston Churchill once said, "is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free men prize."

"Who guards the guardians?" asked Lord Justice Leveson more recently.

The immediate trigger for his inquiry was phone hacking, specifically the hacking of Milly Dowler's voicemail.

And anyone who heard her mother giving evidence, who remembers Mrs Dowler describing hearing her daughter's voice, exclaiming to her husband: "She's picked up her voicemails Bob, she's alive!" - will remember why this inquiry matters.

But what started with phone hacking has become a forensic examination of the darkest depths of the culture and practices of the press.

And out of that, over the course of eight months of evidence and more than 400 witnesses, has come a fundamental question about how our newspapers should be regulated.

What's at stake now is either a once-in-a-generation chance to reform the British press, or an existential threat to the freedom of that press, depending on your point of view.

The two sides are firmly entrenched: on the one hand the victims' lobby, led by Hacked Off and the Media Standards Trust want regulation backed by statute, to deliver a fair and accountable press; on the other, a coalition of newspaper bosses and freedom of speech campaigners along with the Free Speech Network say that would be the start of state control of the press and the thin end of a very long wedge.

John Mullin, editor of the Independent On Sunday, put it like this: "Once you cross the rubicon of the Government effectively governing the people who are holding the government to account, that becomes a very awkward and difficult situation.

"The real freedom to criticise and to have a go at the Government, and hold the Government to account is really under pressure then."

Ian Hislop, the editor of Private Eye, told the inquiry: "A press regulated by the state, is no longer a press able to regulate the state."

But if you think we've been here before, we have - the press has been camped in the Last Chance Saloon now since at least 1989, and critics argue it has had its last 'last chance' to put its house in order.

Former FIA boss and now privacy campaigner Max Moseley told Sky News: "We have had endless opportunities, they've had five goes at it, promised each time they would do it. Well they haven't, and now we've come to probably the last opportunity to do this for 20 or 30 years because it's 20 years since Calcutt (the last inquiry into press regulation).

"If we don't do something we will be left with the press that produced the terrible abuses that we've seen during the Leveson Inquiry and I don't think the public will accept that, I think if the politicians don't do as they should do, and all the opinion polls absolutely confirm this, there will be a serious backlash from the public against whichever party stops this going through."

Which leaves Mr Cameron with something of a problem.

He said himself in his own evidence to Leveson: "We can't say it's the last chance saloon all over again, you know, we've done that."

And he has committed himself to implement any recommendations that are not "bonkers".

But that will put him in direct confrontation with members of his own party, including all the Conservative members of the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee, and key figures in the coalition who say you can't have statutory regulation, even a "light dab of statute" as Hugh Grant has suggested, without reintroducing state licencing of the press, and that was abolished in 1695.

They argue that we don't need a new law, just to enforce the existing ones.

Phone hacking is against the law, as any of those charged and currently awaiting trial could tell you, and invasion of privacy and defamation are actionable in the civil courts.

And then there is the question of the internet - the electronic elephant in this inquiry room - in an increasingly digital, and rapidly evolving media landscape. How do you regulate blogs and tweets?

The current system of self-regulation under the Press Complaints Commission is coming to an end, even the PCC itself accepts that. But where we go from here is about to become a very political battle.

It's closing time in the Last Chance Saloon and the lights have come on, but will Mr Cameron be able to resist one last swift half for the road?

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